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Ken –
Concerning Black Cauldron, Mickey Mouse, and the few other Disney games that you produced – who started the dialogue first? Did you contact Disney, or did Disney see your abilities, and approach you? Seemed like a pretty good partnership with Disney being as large as it was – what prevented more games to result from your partnership in the years to come?
Thanks
-Brad -
(re: Sierra and Disney)
Good question….
We approached Disney about doing games.
Unfortunately, there were creative differences between my staff and Disney. I always believe that each product should have one designer. My vision was that we would license the characters from Disney and then pay them royalties. I was young and didn’t know better. Instead, they formed a group that was then assigned to us – to help us design the games. Theoretically, the group was there to insure that we correctly represented the Disney licensed characters, but some of the people in the group interpreted this as “helping to design the game”. I liked the people we were working with, but design by committee doesn’t work. Each project went over budget and had long delays as my creative people and Disney’s fought creative battle after creative battle. The products that came out of the collaboration were great – I particularly liked the Black Cauldron game and Donalds Playground (both by Al Lowe). But, my recollection is that due to the cost overruns we lost money on all of them. Ultimately, we decided that it was too costly to produce the Disney products, and Disney started doing their own products without us.
-Ken W -
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(re: Sierra and Disney) Disney was not (to my memory) in the game business prior to Sierra.
With respect to your question about whether they tried to “copy us” after they went their own way – that’s not how the creative world works. Generally speaking, it is not uncommon for people to believe they know more than other people. I have no way of knowing what the Disney people were thinking, but my guess would be that they really thought the games they did themselves would be a LOT better than those done with Sierra.
My vague recollection is that Disney lost a lot of money on the software business in the years after Sierra, but did several years later finally start to ship great product.
-Ken W
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